Friday, May 10, 2013

MMDHD and the Velsicol PBB Contamination

I think most people who live in this part of Michigan know
the story of the Michigan Chemical Corporation (later Velsicol Chemical
Company) that operated in St. Louis from the 1930s-1970s.The factory manufactured DDT and PBB, as well
as salt and other chemicals.In terms of
jobs, those were good times for GratiotCounty, but some products
were toxic, and the factory—now defunct—skirted environmental stewardship and
regulations.Tons of DDT was dumped into
the PineRiver (now an EPA Superfund Cleanup Site).In 1973 PBB was accidentally shipped to a
Farm Bureau plant in Battle Creek
and mixed with livestock feed.It was
fed to animals which our citizens ultimately consumed.It was the largest chemical contamination in
the history of our country.The story is
well told in the book “The Poisoning of Michigan” by Joyce Egginton. (Norm Keon donated a copy to our library in 2010 and
encourages all of us to read it.)

This incident is personal for the Mid-Michigan District
Health Department. Some Department employees or relatives worked at the factory
or lived in the immediate neighborhood, including our Medical Director Dr.
Graham, who had a summer job there while he was in college.Like other residents of the area, these
people live with uncertainty as to how their health or the health of their
loved ones has been affected.

One of the first things I asked when I came to the
Department was what our role was in the mitigation and monitoring of the
after-effects of the PBB contamination. I was saddened to learn that—although
our Environmental Health unit wanted to be actively involved—there was little
we could do. We had no funding for testing or counseling or any of the things a
more-well-endowed Department might have done.All we could do was continue to be a witness to this tragedy.Our epidemiologist, Norm Keon continued to
attend the Pine River Citizen Superfund Task Force.

It was through the Task Force that Norm met people from EmoryUniversity’s
Rollins School of Public Health, including Dr. Michele Marcus. She and her
colleagues want to study the long-term health effects of PBBs.And so they are collaborating with MMDHD’s Epi
team to start a small project and go after a bigger grant from the National
Institute of Environmental Health (NIEH).MMDHD is going to do blood draws from 20 exposed people, including MMDHD employees who were exposed. Emory will
use the analysis of those samples as data for a proposal to the NIEH for a major study, which they say has a good chance of being funded. At last,
we have something we can do to try to help our community recover.

This all makes me think two things: First, even if all you
can do is hang in there with your community and be a witness to its big health
challenges, do it. Norm’s patience and vigilance has borne fruit after years of
waiting. Second, the best possible outcome of all this would be to get a big
NIEH grant, help Emory do a definitive study, and find: absolutely nothing; to
have conclusive proof that the nightmare is over.